![]() If you want to lower deaths among women and young children, give them moneyĪ new study published in Nature has discovered … wait for it … that if you give poor people money then their lives tend to improve. At least when it comes to everything except the size of your tax bill. Even tech titans seem to have internalized the idea that bigger is always better. As the health writer Sarah Berry has pointed out, Hugh Jackman’s 2000 Wolverine was a lot less ripped than his most recent portrayal of the character: “Over the years Jackman’s physique changed so much that his original Wolverine seems nothing short of doughy now.”Īll of this isn’t to say that Bezos and Zuckerberg have body image issues – just that the rise of buff billionaires should be seen in the broader context of a more muscle-centric definition of masculinity. Related research from 2018 found that both boys and girls “prefer hyper-muscular male action figures over normally-muscular action figures: vidence that children have internalized the muscular male body ideal”. “The increase in action figure dimensions may contribute to the multifactorial development of an idealized body type that focuses on a lean, muscular physique,” the researchers wrote. Muscles have always been associated with masculinity, but there has been a shift in male beauty ideals over the last few decades: the ideal male figure has become a lot bulkier and difficult to achieve.Ī 2006 study, for example, found that action figures have become more muscular over the last 25 years. More generally, we live in an image-obsessed culture that has spawned an increase in body image issues in boys and young men. There are numerous reasons for this, including the tech world’s obsession with biohacking and treating the human body like it’s a machine that can be optimized. The size of your biceps has become as much a status symbol these days as the size of your bank balance. ![]() “ Billionaires these days are buff,” the Guardian recently observed. “Ripped abs are the new power trip for CEOs,” El País has stated. We are in “the era of the buff mogul”, the New York Post declared last year. It’s not just Zuck and Bezos getting swole. Apparently he got into jiu-jitsu during the pandemic, while us lesser mortals were baking bread and bingeing Netflix. A couple of weeks before boasting about his Murph time, Zuckerberg revealed that he had won gold and silver in a Brazilian jiu-jitsu tournament. ![]() He did it in just under 40 minutes, an elite time. ![]() Mark Zuckerberg has certainly been hitting the gym: last week the Facebook founder marked Memorial Day by doing “ the Murph Challenge”, an intense workout that involves putting on a 20lbs vest and doing 100 pull-ups, 200 push-ups, 300 squats and a mile-long run. Now how about paying some more tax?īezos’s transformation from a weedy e-commerce nerd to dollar-store Vin Diesel seems to have inspired his peers. You look like you can crush walnuts with your buttocks. I have seen Jeff Bezos’s bare chest far more times than I would like (which is zero times) because the Amazon founder always seems to be shirtless on a yacht. A number of billionaires, you may have noticed, can’t stop showing off their muscles. ![]()
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